I watched “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas” the other night – now out on video and well worth watching. Set in wartime it is about a German boy who talks and then befriends a Jewish boy inside a concentration camp.

The reality is gripping. This is not a movie for children.

Yes, there is grief. Grief for the Jewish race who suffered such atrocity; grief for the German people who at first didn’t understand, who then wouldn’t understand, and then it was all too late – and those who objected were eliminated.

But there is also grief for now – for us here in Australia. For we have deliberately set ourselves on the same pathway – or at least our politicians have, and we have not understood.

Out of Nazi Germany came Nuremberg – and the movie by that name is one that should not be missed. Out of the agony of the Nuremberg trials of 1945/6 came the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 by the United Nations with the object of preventing such horrors from ever happening again.

On the 60th anniversary of this declaration the Secretary-General of the UN Ban Ki-moon said:

The campaign reminds us that in a world still reeling from the horrors of the Second World War, the Declaration was the first global statement of what we now take for granted – the inherent dignity and equality of all human beings.

So what have we done now that should also give us grief?

Victoria and the ACT have adopted their own Bills of Rights but have deliberately excluded the unborn child and the issue of abortion. Surely it would have been less of a rebellion to just adopt the Universal Declaration and ignore the rights of the unborn or have some judge declare that it didn’t apply. But to actually exclude the unborn shows the mindset of those who drafted the bills to suit our own culture of death – for that is what it is.

For those who had any doubt that the UDHR did in fact include the unborn – and remember that abortion and eugenics were part of Nazi Germany – we only need to look at the recognition of this by the UN General Assembly on November 20, 1959 as the excerpts below show (emphasis mine):

Whereas the child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth,

Whereas the need for such special safeguards has been stated in the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child of 1924, and recognized in theUniversal Declaration of Human Rights and in the statutes of specialized agencies and international organizations concerned with the welfare of children…

To deliberately set out to undermine the great Universal Declaration, thereby repudiating the lessons of history and relegating them to the rubbish bin within the space of just six decades, is an incredible tragedy and an abuse of that most fundamental right of all human beings, the right to life itself.

Yes, an occasion for grief and an appropriate degree of horror at the path we have set.

No, I don’t live my whole life in grief – and yet that is almost appropriate. Every day is a new day, given by God, a gift, another day to enjoy His creation and His created people. Every person has within them some measure of the visible image of God, a measure to be discovered and nurtured and enjoyed.And I revel in this – but I also have an unshakeable resolve to do what I can and encourage others to turn this country around.